2008 Woodie Awards
District logs on to Google e-mail
Joe Chapot
Issue date: 9/22/08 Section: News
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The e-mail "will be the official electronic communication" for the three schools in the district, CSM, Cañada and Skyline, said Eric Raznick, director of information technology services. The e-mail address students receive is an amalgamation of a student's name, followed by (at) my (dot) smccd (dot) edu, Raznick said, and in cases of people with the same name, numbers will be used to differentiate between different people.
"The goal of the system is to allow all students to receive web messages without problem," Vice President of Student Services Jennifer Hughes said. If students don't want to deal with having two e-mail accounts, Hughes said, "they have the ability to forward e-mails to their personal accounts."
The program was started after officials at CSM, Cañada and Skyline noticed that while most students had e-mails, some don't, making internet announcements and services like WebSmart unavailable to them. Additionally, some students have been unable to get the school to properly send them e-mail notices.
Hughes, along with Vice Presidents of Student Services at Cañada and Skyline, Phyllis Lucas-Woods and Loretta P. Adrian, respectively, had a committee formed over summer 2008 to explore such a system.
That committee recommended Google Apps in Education over competing services provided by Microsoft and Yahoo, said Raznick. Google's programs are free to license, Raznick said, "but a lot of time by the faculty and staff has been put into the set-up of the service."
Students will have the ability to keep the e-mail forever and receive 7 gigabytes of storage space, as well as access other apps provided by Google, Hughes added.
Currently a pilot program is being tested in 10 classes divided between the three schools and involves roughly 300 students, said Hughes.
One of the biggest proponents of the service was CSM English Professor Tim Maxwell. "I first started developing interest in Google Apps during the spring (2008) semester," Maxwell said.
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